Friday, October 4, 2013

School's In! Class on slingshotting

I'll start today with a thank to Kyle Yanowski, of the High Drag podcast, for the very kind mention of this blog in episode 19. You can listen to the podcast itself, or watch the streaming video event during which it was recorded. I'm the featured item in the "Noob Corner" segment at 32:30. Kyle said that my positive attitude and enjoyment of all the corners of the Eve sandbox was a refreshing antidote to the "bittervet" syndrome, to which I will one day, no doubt, succumb.

Pre-Class

I logged in about an hour before Kyle's class on basic PvP techniques was due to begin, which gave me time to scratch my exploration itch. My Venture was still four jumps from home, so I started heading back there to re-ship into my exploration Imicus when I encountered a couple of my corp mates in Indregulle. We sat in a plex for a couple of minutes, but someone else closed a plex and tipped the system to "vulnerable", meaning it was 100% under Gallente control (except for the formality of attacking the hub). That meant offensive plexes would NOT pay out LP, so we left.

There was an interesting discussion on the corp forum about this. I asked why there were vulnerable systems that we did not immediately attack and capture. The answer was that it's not actually in our interest to capture every system as soon as we can, partly because that would give the Caldari somewhere new to offensively plex and give us one more place to defend and one less place to farm LP. There are other reasons too, but they're secret -- shhh!

Exploration

I got into the Imicus and went to a nearby quiet system that I'd noticed on the way in, which had three cosmic signatures. Juice! Scanned 'em all down....all wormholes! I'm not yet ready to roll the dice on entering wormholes solo. Did you ever read Frederick Pohl's "Gateway"? It's like that with me and wormholes.

I returned to our home system and tried the cosmic signature I saw there. Bingo! Hey, why leave home when you have treasure at your doorstep? It was not a difficult site to run and I picked up about 8 million ISK of loot. I blew up one tower, the most lucrative one when my hacks failed, but that's OK for now. It was interesting to finally notice that the difficult of the hacking mini-game is proportional to how valuable the loot is. You are never going to find a rich treasure with weak defenses (as far as I know).

I've memorized the basic formula for deciding which scatter containers to grab. At a data site tower with no blueprints, grab parts then materials. If a blueprint is there, and you want it, it will be in a data container. At a relic site, all the salvage is in parts AND materials, so grab all of those. That covers most of what you'll find. But, for reference, you should still have the handy-dandy table from the bottom of this page pasted into a Notepad in-game.

Hunting Wabbits

During my exploration the corp was setting up an attempt to pluck an annoying thorn from our side. The guy who podded our CEO was seen in system so we set up an attempt to pin him down. He remains cloaked most of the time and uses a micro-jump drive to escape, so it is very difficult to pin him down. This attempt was unsuccessful, though we look forward to many more!

Slingshotting

Kyle led us in a class about slingshotting. When fighting other players you will frequently get scrammed (your warp drive is disable, preventing you from escaping). But if you can get the distance between you and your enemy to be greater than the range of his scrambler, it will lose its hold on you (its "point" in Eve slang) and you can escape. If your enemy is using the "orbit" command, there's a trick you can do to use his momentum against him and hopefully break out of his grasp.